Radiohead Pulls Its Music From Spotify: ‘We’re Standing Up For Our Fellow Musicians’

One of the big arguments that will be unfolding in the music industry over the next few years centers around online radio. What should artists get paid? What should the royalties be? What’s the value of a music stream? Radiohead obviously believes that musicians aren’t presently being paid nearly enough.

Right now we’re still in the early stages of a long-term project that’s already having a hugely positive effect on artists and new music. We’ve already paid US$500m to rightsholders so far and by the end of 2013 this number will reach US$1bn. Much of this money is being invested in nurturing new talent and producing great new music.

Every streamcaster can tell his number of connects, minute by minute. Just get some code monkey to rig a way of counting the full-song connects of each song, aggregate them over a month, compare them to all other songs played during the month, and that’s the percentage of the monthly fee each artist gets.

Sure, it would take a lot of computations, but isn’t that what computers were originally built to handle?